I happened to be poking around in Tiger's System Profiler.app, and noticed that it has a battery cycle count listed, among other battery information in the Power section under Hardware. Knowing this might be useful for people deciding whether they can live with their current *Book -- or at least with their current battery -- until Intel-based *Books appear.

[robg adds: I'm pretty sure this is new to Tiger, so I've marked it 10.4 only; if I'm wrong, please let me know. With prior versions of OS X, you had to use ioreg to get cycle count info, as explained in this hint.]

>>Does this show how many cycles are remaining or how many the battery has gone through already?

Cycles the battery has gone through to date. BTW, it's not merely the number of times you've plugged in the recharger; rather, the equivalent number of full discharge/recharge cycles.

Couple of Apple web pages on the subject:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

"Battery Lifespan
A properly maintained PowerBook or iBook battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 300 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs."

"A charge cycle means using all of the battery's power, but that doesn't necessarily mean a single charge. For instance, you could listen to your iPod for a few hours one day, using half its power, and then recharge it fully. If you did the same thing the next day, it would count as one charge cycle, not two, so you may take several days to complete a cycle. Each time you complete a charge cycle, it diminishes battery capacity slightly, but you can put both notebook and iPod batteries through many charge cycles before they will only hold 80% of original battery capacity. As with other rechargeable batteries, you may eventually need to replace your battery."

This is all well and good. I noticed, however, that mine lists a piece of information that I would like to change: First Low Level Warning is NO. This explains in part why the OS reports my capacity off and never warns me when it gets low (just suddenly shuts off at 84% life remaining).

As usual, what might be broken or not broken in such hardware related software functionality depends on which hardware you have: with my TiBook 1 Ghz (cycle count 141), I still get the low battery warning, even under 10.3.9.

I had the same problem with a Titanium Powerbook. I took it to the Apple Store and they replaced the battery. My Aluminum Power Book has the same setting as yours set to no and I still get the warning. If your machine is less than a year old you can probably get a new battery free of charge. Even with AppleCare they don't like to replace batteries after a year, it seems. In fact my battery has been losing capacity and they don't want to replace it. Your problem is probably with the chip on the battery not communicating properly to the Power Manager and that should get a replacement. Good Luck ;-)